Ginger beer is strong ginger ale.
Root beer has no ginger in it at all. It has a sweet herbal wintergreen flavor.
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I made my own fermented ginger beer once as an experiment. Conceptually, it was really close to pruno.
You mean the joyous reaction to over-sugaring my inner child with sweet sweet candy juice?
May not be pleasant for others around me, but I love the stuff (also Pepsi blue… sadly long since gone…)
I love chinotto. It’s not that easy to find, though.
I don’t know, haven’t had kvass but malta is a byproduct from brewing but its non-alcoholic. It’s basically spent barley and molasses and the flavor is very molasses forward. I love it, and while not common done I have used it with rum for mixed drinks. If you want to try it the one Goya makes is ok but my favorite is the Venezuelan brand Malta Polar
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A few of these, and you won’t care what root beer tastes like:
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All of the “root beer” available these days is actually sarsaparilla. No one makes real root beer anymore since it turns out that sassafras root causes cancer.
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Whoa, did not know that.
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Common ingredients in root beer include vanilla, cherry tree bark, wintergreen, molasses, anise, liquorice root , cinnamon, and honey among others. The primary ingredient is still sassafras flavour
Seems like they would use some kind of extract or artificial flavor for the sassafras if i had to guess. I really don’t care to find out since i don’t like it, but seeing the other ingredients tells me exactly why i hate everything about the drink. I don’t like things with cherry, anise and licorice and i’m very picky about what foods i have that happen to have cinnamon and vanilla, and i very rarely have things with mint in them.
My local Italian grocery closed, and anyway they only stocked the San Pellegrino kind, which is a Nestle product.
If you have an Eataly near you, I found they usually have a couple of different brands of chinotto!
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Kvass is made from rye bread, sugar, and dried fruit. It is also considered non alcoholic, but nothing fermented is completely non alcoholic. It is very dark and malty.
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I wonder how the Japanese might like yerba mate?
My old boss always had crates of Materva, but I didn’t like the taste so much. He called it liquid crack, supposedly for the energy it gave you.
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I was the only one in my family with the same opinion. Birch beer and ginger beer taste much better. If I didn’t look so much like my mother, they might’ve suggested there was a mix-up at the hospital where I was born.
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I wouldn’t describe malta as being malty, it tends to have more of a brown sugar/molasses taste to it. My experience is most Americans find the taste to be weird, i don’t mind… more for me 
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I’d love to try kvass someday; the description makes it sound like something you’d drink as punishment, but the Russian cookbooks I have never fail to include fond memories of drinking kvass from street vendors.
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Doesn’t Schweppes make cream soda? I don’t drink soda any more, but IIRC, Schweppes Cream Soda isn’t that sweet compared to, you know, Pepsi or Fanta.
Also, do you have Sarsi in Europe? I thought that was fairly close to root beer back in the day, (sweeter than, say, Dad’s or Barg’s, but not as sweet as A&W or Mug).
In my experience, it tasted like someone poured their last bit of Coors into your flat cola.
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One quick google search later… Apparently yes, but seems it is only distributed in UK. In spain you can find easily schweppes’ tonic water and ginger ale, and less commonly - it’s more of a gourmet than supermarket thing - orange and lemon flavored sodas, and weirdly flavored tonic waters.
I don’t know about Sarsi, but in the 50’s and 60’s “zarzaparrilla” was a common drink in spain, with a national manufactured poised to compete with Coca Cola:
(Photo caption says: “Sarsaparrilla 1001: 100% spanish cola-based drink”)
Unfortunately these days it’s night impossible to find in Spain a sarsaparrilla-flavored soda, unless you resort to import.
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